I wonder if someone else thinks alike. Often I find myself committing things wondering whether a particular snippet doesn’t break the *BSD or gentoo build. Now wouldn’t it be handy to fire up a virtual machine (with all the devel tools), test the snippet and go back to your usual work flow?
Just this weekend I was on the prowl for a FreeBSD image with texinfo (esp. texi2dvi) installed, I ended up installing my own copy and compiling devel tools for the next 3 hours. Whereas all I wanted is to quickly download a ready 500M qemu image, fire it up, test my stuff and throw it away again.
Question now: Is there something like http://virtualboximages.com/ or http://www.vmware.com/appliances/ specifically tailored to the needs of developers? Or more precisely, the task is to list all such places, because having to search for stuff for hours is just as bad as installing stuff for hours.
What about the openSUSE build service (OBS):
http://en.opensuse.org//openSUSE:Build_Service
It supports scriptable automated builds within kvm or xen machines. Just sign up for a free account and configure some “packages” (builds and tests) remote via osc command line client or webinterface. It also supports local builds within chroot.
They have all the major Linux distros available ready to use.
To have more exotic systems/archs you would need to install such OBS server by yourself at home. Having it at home would make you even able to log in your build machines to debug interactively.
cu,
Rudi